


with the colors shining bright

by Mertiya



Series: Fire Emblem Missing Scenes [3]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Gen, My Unit | Byleth Has Emotions, Time Travel, a whole hell of a lot of alternate timelines, and abuse thereof, there's byleth/lin if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 16:36:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20491904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: Byleth's perspective on the events of Edelgard's route.





	with the colors shining bright

**Author's Note:**

> okay i DID finish (at least the Black Eagles part of) the game. finally. and I have a lot of feelings about divine pulse, okay, just...a lot

The thing about growing up as a mercenary is that you see a lot of death. To Byleth, death has always been a part of life. Shamir would probably understand this. And it isn’t as if he didn’t enjoy the company of the men and women he grew up with. He did. He mourned their deaths, but they never seemed to have much impact. They just saw him as ‘that kid’, and he just saw them as first and foremost Jeralt’s friends. He and Jeralt were always moving, and the only permanent thing seemed to be impermance. Sometimes he wondered if there was something wrong with him, when he watched a woman crying over her lover’s body, but most of the time it just seemed like there was no point to worrying about it.

Somehow, being at the monastery changed him. The students seemed like real people to him in a way no one ever had before. There wasn’t a great revelation or anything like that. It was simply as if the world shifted slowly from muted grey into colors, as if he’d been blind his whole life and slowly slipped into the habit of being able to see.

Until he watched Jeralt die. Until he watched Jeralt die _twice_.

It was like the world turned _red_. He tried to find the grey again, but he couldn’t. Standing at his father’s grave hurt more than any injury ever had. It wasn’t grey, it was all colors—the bright blue of the sky, the purple of the violets left on the gravestone, the green of the trees waving beyond. Colors so brilliant that his eyes hurt and the tears dripped down without stopping.

It was Linhardt who found him there, Linhardt with his unerring sense for pain and injury. It was Linhardt who led him carefully away and sat him down underneath a spreading tree, with the wind whispering through it, and gently put a cup of tea between his hands. Linhardt didn’t say anything, not then; he didn’t touch Byleth. He just sat patiently and waited as Byleth sipped at the tea and made awful noises he’d never made before and got tears and snot all over the cup. Then he took the teacup away and made Byleth lie down, and if the resulting nap did nothing to deaden the colors, it somehow made them more bearable.

And that’s what Linhardt has always meant to Byleth, a cool green blur on the battlefield whose touch brings comfort. A gentle soul who tries to avoid the fighting but who is no less important for that. He’s saved so many of them so many times. When Byleth wakes up five years later, that much hasn’t changed, although the colors of the world have turned darker and bloodier.

After he kills Alois, it becomes harder for Byleth to keep going. But he has promised his loyalty to Edelgard, and he will not disappoint her. He can see how deeply the choices she makes and keeps making cut her to the quick. If he cannot save her and the other Black Eagles from the path they must walk, he can at least make it easier.

It makes battles even more exhausting than they should be, but it has become second nature by now. If he has to carry these memories, no one else does. The memory of Linhardt’s face when gentle Mercedes attacked him, when he reflexively responded with flames and she died screaming. The way everything in Lin’s body broke in a moment, and this time it was him who turned grey, sagging to the ground beside her body like a puppet whose strings had been cut. The colors swirled so bright and maddening it was almost difficult for Byleth to take hold of the threads of time and yank them backwards, letting him run full-tilt across the field and take Mercedes’ life himself, with one swift, painless thrust of the burning sword.

Edelgard’s face when she executes Dimitri is almost as bad, but he can’t change that. He knows because he tried until blood ran from his nose; there is no argument he can make that will save her from what she knows she must do.

He’s not sure if it’s worse to watch his friends killing or his friends dying, because he’s seen that, too, so many times that it haunts his nightmares. He’s seen Petra fall silently beneath an axe that splits her skull in half; he’s seen Marianne’s face turn white as she clutches at the blade of a sword entering just beneath her breast-bone. Linhardt at her side, saying her name in a low, rapid voice, crying as his healing magic washes over her with no effect. He’s seen Hubert take a death-blow meant for Edelgard; he’s seen her kneeling mutely over Hubert’s body with eyes too large for her face.

He’s seen so many more tragedies, and he’s turned things back so many times, undoing his latest fatal mistake. He tries to save everyone, but he can’t save everyone. He can keep his friends safe, but he’s tried and tried and tried to save the old friends fighting them. Once in a while it works. Lysithea, face pale, glances at Claude and then offers to join them, and then she flings herself into Edelgard’s arms, sobbing.

But for every time he saves someone, for every time Claude dips his head with a laughing shrug and offers his sword in surrender, there’s Felix’s face, carved from stone, as he slides his blade into his father’s heart. There’s Alois, cursing Byleth’s name with his dying breath. There’s Dedue, laying his life down for Dimitri.

At first Byleth thinks he hates Rhea for this, but by the time they’re actually fighting her, he realizes she’s not the one who deserves it. It’s him, and his exhaustion, and the way he can never save everyone, can never make the world run correctly, even with so many more attempts than any mortal gets. Rhea’s breath sears the breath from Linhardt’s lungs, and Byleth holds him and cries as he hasn’t cried since Jeralt’s death, but at the same time, he’s already turning the hands back in golden light and screaming out a warning that’s half desperate plea to Marianne, who’s the only person who can get there in time.

And she does; she catches Rhea’s attack on Blutgang, standing tall in front of Linhardt’s drooping form. She’s so tall, this woman he first knew as a girl who hated herself and prayed to the Goddess to let her die. There’s no sign of that in her face now, even though she’s walking this painful path along with them. Silhouetted against the burning flames, there’s only determination in her face as she raises her sword, leaps forward, and strikes strong and true. Rhea staggers backward at the heavy blow, bleeding from a long gash across her pale flesh.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Byleth grits his teeth and steps forward, lashing at her with the Sword of the Creator and watching in dawning horror and frustration as she skips out of the way of a blow that should have finished her. He’s overbalanced himself in his exhaustion, and he’s falling. Pain lances through his hands as he hits the ground hard, and he looks up to find that Rhea is rearing back and preparing for another blow. It hurts, it hurts too much for Byleth to respond, and he wonders if that means he’s going to die this time, so close, too close, but not close _enough_—

And Linhardt’s there, standing in front of him, bright magic surging from his fingertips into the heaving hide of the Immaculate One. She screams, and tears appear on Linhardt’s cheeks, but he doesn’t stop. A moment later, Hubert has joined him, darkness surging forward at his touch; then it’s Lysithea and Dorothea. Magic swirls towards her in a torrent. A hail of arrows from Shamir and Bernadetta come next, and Byleth can’t help the moment he takes to stare at Bernadetta, her hair floating in the wind, her face smudged with ash, and the determination in her eyes. Caspar, Petra, and Ferdinand run forward, a war cry bursting from all three throats, and they leap towards Rhea—

Wearily, Byleth reaches for his power, because isn’t this what he’s tried to protect them all from for so long? He can do this. He just has to avoid stumbling, he just has to—

_Byleth_. It’s the softest whisper of a voice he hasn’t heard in years. _Let them do this for you._

The glow on the ends of his fingers dies, and he stares wonderingly at all of them, all of his once-students, now-friends, the color surging in their faces and eyes in the flickering glow of the firelight. And then someone’s beside him, holding out a hand to him, someone dressed all in crimson, and Edelgard is actually smiling as she says, “Professor, let’s finish this.”


End file.
